


Only Dreaming

by BooBalooPants



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Dreams, Implied Smut, Implied hand jobs, M/M, curse all the dreams especially the implied ones, im so implied, im sorry, implied characters, so many implied things, won't make much sense if you don't read the other fic, wow i overdid the dream motif once again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 00:35:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17477945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BooBalooPants/pseuds/BooBalooPants
Summary: Beast cannot sleep, and so he wonders about Gaston's dreams and his own.(Hidden/bonus scene for Forest Of Beasts fic)





	Only Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> A short, sappy implied-smut bonus scene to go with the long fic (Forest of Beasts). It proceeds the dance scene in Chapter 14.  
> I promised something like this a shameful amount of time ago. So sorry!  
> Also this is a gift fic and I won't be keeping it online here for too long. Limited time sort-of bad smut only, I guess! Hope you guys understand.

 

The forest seemed different that night; almost like a waking dream.

It even felt like one; peaceful and warm, complimented by the sweet scents of fruit that hung within the little orchard. Even though there were not many stars out, it was still light enough. The trees were haloed by moonlight, and the sky was softer and faded, like an old oil painting.

It should have been very easy to fall asleep, but Beast had never felt so awake in his entire life.

“Are you awake?” he spoke to the ground.

Nobody answered. It wasn't surprising, but Beast was still disappointed somehow.

He looked over at Gaston, with a familiar sort of twist in his stomach.

The hunter lay on his side with his back to him, but still close enough that Beast could see the individual threads of his dirtied shirt. The way his cape moved up and down, with the heavier sounds of his breathing.

His injured arm was stretched out, and pulsed occasionally. Tiny beads of sweat dotted the exposed skin there, all of it highlighted by the moonlight.

Beast had quickly begun to recognise the pattern of the hunter's breaths in sleep, however accidentally it might have been. He knew how Gaston moved or didn't move, how his throat quivered between the beats of a second, or how his fingers sometimes curled, as if he might be trying to cling onto something he couldn't quite reach.

Beast always wondered about what that might be.

He budged a bit closer, so that the gap between them was non-existent.

It wasn't an odd gesture anymore. They'd been sleeping so much closer to each other with each passing night in the forest, and neither of them had bothered to acknowledge it. It was normal, and perhaps some sort of reassurance, knowing the other was nearby, and hearing a breath that wasn't just his own.

Beast reached over, with the intent to cover the hunter up some more with his own cape. He stopped when he saw Gaston's face properly, and his breath caught in his throat.

Gaston didn't look comfortable in his sleep. His mouth twitched, undecided between a frown and something a bit easier, and his brow was creased, like he might be having a puzzling if not entirely frightening dream.

It was often alarming to look at. In waking the hunter seemed virtually indestructible, and yet he slept like a child. Restless and apparently full of bad dreams.

Beast was getting used to that too, though. And he knew Gaston much better now.

He knew secret smiles and frowns that weren't quite that. He knew hands on paws that didn't need to linger there, but did anyway.

And now he knew impromptu dances, accompanying words that made Beast feel giddy with the mere idea of them.

_I want to help you break the curse. I'll do whatever I can._

The hunter's words hadn't stopped chiming around in Beast's head yet, and his stomach was still flipping far too often with them, but it was never in an unpleasant way. Quite the opposite. 

“...Gaston,” he rested his paw on the hunter's arm.

He felt muscle quivering under him, but nothing else.

Beast lay down on his side, watching the outline of his back for just a little while.

It had been soothing in the nights before. Whenever they'd been in peril and had escaped it, lying down to rest was a simple necessity, and watching the hunter breathe was an incredible comfort. A reminder that they'd survived something else together, and they were safe again for the moment.

It was still all of that, but there was something else now. Beast felt full of fire, and he couldn't help it.

He couldn’t help himself. 

Slowly, but not really thinking on it, he curved his arm the rest of the way around Gaston. There he found the graceful dip of a collarbone, sliding into a defined chest.

Gaston's heart was a defiant pound beneath his palm for some long moments, and Beast closed his eyes within them.

His own heart became a rapid drum, as he considered he might already be fast asleep and dreaming.

Then there was a hitched breath, and Gaston's shoulder moved only slightly, underneath Beast's arm.

“...can't sleep, Beast?” his voice was soft, and it crackled with sleep. There was the faintest edge of a sneer within it.

Beast knew that it was harmless.

“I was...”

He trailed off, as a gloved hand slid up and then over his paw.

It rested there, and their fingers curved automatically together.

“...you feel warm...” Gaston murmured.

He was probably mostly asleep, if not entirely. In any case, he sounded like he might be dreaming.

Beast exhaled, unaware he'd been holding his breath.

“You're warm, too,” he said uselessly.

Gaston's shoulder shook with a scoff.

“.. _.so_ soft-hearted, Beast...”

Beast wanted to grin.

“Thanks. I think.”

“...mm.”

Their fingers seemed to press tighter together, although Beast might have just been imagining it.

Either way, he was encouraged by it. He scrunched his paw against chest, into a much more intended hold.

“What have you been dreaming about, hunter?” he wondered, more to himself.

Then, before the instinct might abandon him, he dragged his paw down and _down._ Past sculpted, bare lines of torso, and into something else, much further beneath that.

Gaston's hand slipped away with another uneven breath, and it might have been a sound of surprise. Beast couldn't be sure, anymore.

He waited in a moment of absolute stillness; heart hanging in his mouth and helpless to whatever the consequences might be.

He wondered if Gaston might still try to kill him.

But the hunter didn't move, or turn his head, or do anything at all, for that matter.

Beast stared at dark and tangled hair, and then began to register the turbulent pulse of skin beneath him.

The forest silence was suddenly too loud and unbearable.

“...I'm sorry,” he said in a rush. He began to retract his paw. “I didn't mean-”

In the same instant he felt a rippled press against his body, and he could have tasted neckline, for how close the hunter's heat suddenly was.

A hand reached out and into the grass, and Gaston’s sigh turned into a soft moan.

It was like a wordless admission, and Beast's heart reached his mouth again. Struck by wonderful disbelief, for a few seconds. 

He blinked up, to where the shelter of trees were pierced with moonlight; making the edges of leaves seem to shine, and dappling the ground and then thehunter himself, in surreal dots of white.

It was a sight almost too beautiful to be anything but a vague dream.

_Oh, but then he remembered; perhaps it was all just a dream._

They were becoming so blurred in recent days, merging with the strange and twisting events of waking hours in the forest itself. _Anything_ seemed possible now, and it wouldn't have been so surprising anymore.

The thought only made Beast a bit bolder.

He hooked another arm quickly around Gaston, and then into an easy embrace.

There was a low hum of appreciation, vibrating from the hunter's chest, and reaching Beast's grip.

"...hah...you're so _needy_ , Beast..." Gaston said, and Beast could imagine his grin.

 He knew it then; his own desire wasn't just wishful thinking anymore.

He leaned over a tensed shoulder, very close to Gaston's ear, but not quite far enough to know his expression. Gaston's head was bowed and mostly hidden, anyway.

“You remember when we danced, hunter?” Beast asked him.

“Of course I do,” the usual conceit in Gaston’s voice had become fainter. 

Beast smiled a bit. He began to move his paw; carefully and with purpose, in a way that made fabric superfluous, and an easy obstacle to overcome.

“So...you remember what you said to me, about the curse?”

Gaston laughed again, but it was full of tremors.

“...I-I say a lot of things, Beast...”

“That is true,” Beast's smile stretched, around a deep inhalation of the hunter's scent. “I was just wondering though, if I might have dreamt it.”

“...you didn't...”

Gaston's voice faded quickly away into breathlessness, as Beast took a proper hold of him.

“Doesn't matter, anyway. I'm still impressed, hunter.”

He curved his head into prickling collarbone, something that had become far more like a waiting and wanted memory at this point. It just seemed so inevitable and _obvious_ now, as his mouth brushed glistening skin for the first time.

He could have swallowed the hunter up if he wanted to; covered him completely, and devoured him all at once...

“Ah-“

His teeth scraped closer, _too close,_ and then Beast remembered himself, _what he was_ , with a terrible realisation.

_And how much he wanted to kiss him._

“... _Beast_...”

Beast drew back, with an abruptness that shocked even himself.

He blinked, and suddenly he saw Gaston's eyes, flickering but set completely on his own. He had turned his head, so that they were nose to nose, and Beast could see his entire face at last.

It was flushed and glowing against the moonlight, and his mouth was moving into a line of what could only have been affection.

Beast could barely believe it. 

_Surely a dream, then._

“...don't stop...” the hunter muttered. “... _please_...”

Then his jaw slackened open, into an exerted and shuddering breath.

“I won't,” Beast told him. "It's okay."

He smiled against skin as it suddenly rocked against him, in an urgent and rough kind of rhythm.

The hunter tossed his head, and Beast noticed a hand scrabbling at the ground, frantic for a grip that wasn't there again.

Beast caught it in his paw, and didn't let go.

_Yes. It must have been a dream._

“.. _.easy..._ ”

Tremors of skin gradually began to slow beneath him, as did the thud of heartbeat, and then Gaston was suddenly slack in every sense of the word.

“... _damn it_...” he sighed, like some broken relief.

His head tilted away, though Beast could still feel hot breath, panting against his arm. He noticed his own breath was mirroring it too, in an easy sort of way.

For a while they seemed to be the only sounds at all, and it was as if the forest itself might have been recovering, in the aftermath of a wild storm.

Beast closed his eyes, and for a few moments he could have imagined and believed that it wasn't a dream.

Then he felt the twist of the hunter in his arms, like he might be pushing away from him, with an ache in his heart. Nothing ever lasted though, and especially not such wild dreams as this.

Perhaps he was finally waking up.

But strangely the heat remained there, and then it seemed to spread over his chest. Beast felt fingers coiling slowly into it.

He opened his eyes in some surprise.

Gaston was facing him completely. His face was still beaded with sweat and half buried by fur, but he looked like he might be sleeping very peacefully for once.

He mumbled something incoherent, and his fingers curled more tightly, against Beast's chest.

_I want to help you break the curse. I'll do whatever I can._

Beast realised, as he bowed his head into soft skin, that he believed it more than anything else in that moment.

It was a wonderful kind of revelation, even if he was only dreaming, after all.

 

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a/n: this is supposed to be quite ambiguous...is it real, or is Beast having a fun dream, maybe? ;)  You decide!

Thanks for reading. I am rusty and I have missed writing the otp. I thank everyone for their kind words on previous stories!

 

 


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